Ramblings on computers…

Tag Archives: totem-pl-parser

I've arrived about a week late to the party, but there are now some shiny new releases of Almanah, Hitori, Totem/totem-pl-parser (with my I'm-Bastien-Nocera hatbeard on) and libfolks for people to use and abuse. (Versions: 0.9.0, 0.3.2, 3.3.92, 3.3.92 and 0.6.8, respectively.) Many thanks to all the people who've done all the work on them this cycle (including all the bug fixing and running around which I was supposed to do; sorry about that).

Why so late? I was busy. University has been keeping my work queue full up for the past few months, and it's not going to ease off until June. Doing all these releases has made me realise what a bad maintainer I am for projects like Almanah. It's used by many people, but has seen few releases recently, and even less development work (basically none of which has been done by me). There's an ongoing plan to modernise its design, and I'm sad that I can't put any time into making this happen.

I'm putting Almanah up for adoption. Wanted: an enthusiastic new maintainer with big ideas for the project's future. It's a reasonably stable project, with a well documented, if a little crusty, code base. There's plenty of scope for new features, and I'll try and guide you as appropriate. Let me know if you're interested! If not, Almanah will continue to limp along as best I can manage.

To fix problems with parsing playlists from slow servers in Totem, it's necessary to add asynchronous parsing functions to totem-pl-parser, so that parsing can be run in a thread. I've stuck a preliminary patch in bug #561444, but before it goes any further it would be great if other users of totem-pl-parser would take a look and see if the API's sane and suitable for their needs.

I've just finished converting the site to use WordPress instead of the custom software I'd previously been using. It'd been getting too time-consuming to keep everything maintained and up-to-date with the latest things going on on the Internet, and I'd been reduced to making posts via phpMyAdmin due to various things breaking. Hopefully, this should be better, and a lot less hassle to keep running. I apologise if the transition has messed up the feed for anyone, but I've tried my hardest to redirect all the old URLs, so things should keep working as before.

Recently, I had to compile my computing coursework for Windows, as the person for whom it's written only uses Windows. Much to my delight, once I'd figured out the terminology and basic principles, getting it to cross-compile for Windows using MinGW was quite easy! Since I couldn't find much documentation on the process while doing it, I've written up the steps I took, and perhaps someone else will find them useful.

Last month, I also managed to write up some API documentation for totem-pl-parser, which has been on the to-do list for a little while. It was quite easy to get the hang of gtk-doc, too, and once I'd got started, the documentation got done quite quickly. If anyone's implementing anything using totem-pl-parser, I'd appreciate any feedback on the usefulness of the documentation, as it can always be improved.